by Dave Kindred
UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER, TUCSON, AZ
Patient: Kindred, Jared
DOB: 12/08/1988
Date of Encounter: 11/20/2010
Age: 21
WT: 66 kgs
HT: 67 inches
This [is] a male pedestrian who was struck by an automobile at
65 mph. He complains of right-sided abdominal and chest pain, which he describes as a constant, sharp pain that is severe and worse with movement. He also complains of right lower extremity pain. EMS notes that the patient has an obvious right lower extremity deformity. He was splinted in the field. The patient is unable to recall the event. EMS notes that he had loss of consciousness on scene.
Patient has a right tibia/fib fracture, right knee effusion, right superior and inferior rami fracture, right clavicle fracture, right pelvic ring fracture, right iliac crest fracture, grade 2/3 liver laceration, intra and extraperitoneal bladder rupture, and multiple abrasions.
Patient gave us telephone number for his mother, Lynn…
Using Jared’s cell phone, a doctor called Lynn and handed the phone to Jared.
“Mom, I got hit by a car,” he said.
She asked to speak to the doctor.
“How is he?”
The doctor recounted the injuries.
“Is my child going to live?”
The doctor said yes, and they’d do the surgeries tomorrow.
“I’ll be there,” Lynn said.
FIVE
On arrival at the Tucson hospital, Lynn asked a nurse, “Where is he?”
In recovery. Surgery went well.
“Where is the recovery room?”
You can’t go in there yet.
“Yes, I can.”
No, ma’am, he’s not out of the anesthesia yet.
“I’m going in there. Now.”
Ma’am, we’ll have to call security if you do that.
“You damn well better call security, then, because I’m going in there to be with my child.”
When a mother who calls herself Tiger flies three-quarters of the way across America and demands to see her injured child, a nurse’s appropriate response is to point toward the recovery room and get the hell out of the way. Which explains how, on the day of surgery, Lynn put herself in the recovery room at Jared’s bedside and ran a hand over his hair. He had not yet opened his eyes when he said, “I smell you, Mommy.”
Not Mom, not Ma. Mommy.
“I’m right here, buddy,” she said.
Jared said, “Pinchy-face, Mommy.”
He wanted her to do the “pinchy-face” thing she had last done with him as a baby.
Lynn had seen him only once in two years. He came to Myrtle Beach in the summer of 2009, and she saw the facial tattoo for the first time. She didn’t like it. She wanted him to erase it, make it go away. Even as he said he would try to remove it, she knew better. He liked the way it looked. After a week, Lynn said, “Y’know, after a while, you don’t even notice it. You just see Jared.”
Below the tattoo, Mommy pinched her child’s cheek lightly.
I had lost track of Jared. I knew he had lived on the street and on the road for most of the three years since his high school graduation. That was not a life anyone could sustain, most likely a life built around alcohol and other drugs. But in a grandfather’s denial of what was before his eyes, I preferred to cast Jared’s wanderings as a young man’s adventure. I had read Twain on Huck Finn “lighting out for the territory ahead.” Like Huck, Jared had had enough of where he was and he wanted to be somewhere else.
Lynn called from Tucson. She was not crying. She had seen Jared’s mangled body. A tattoo no longer mattered.
Surgeons did two days of work.
Their summary:
UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER, TUCSON, AZ
PROCEDURES/OPERATIONS PERFORMED
11/21—Exploratory laparotomy; repair of rupture.
11/22—Open reduction and internal fixation, right medial clavicle fracture with suture; intramedullary nail fixation, right tibial fracture; open reduction and internal fixation, right pelvic crescent fracture.
He was alive, maybe only because his backpack had come between him and a car. But as broken as he was—he would be in a wheelchair and on crutches through the winter—doctors assured Lynn he would recover. They had put together the pieces of broken bones and sewn together the torn tissue. Time would do the rest, and Lynn was fine with all that.
It was the other thing that worried her more. On her third day in the hospital room, Jared asked, “Why are there two television sets up there?”
Lynn looked at the room’s single TV, mounted on a wall, and said, “What?”
“Two TVs, which one am I supposed to watch?” Jared said. “And now there’s two of you.”
Lynn looked to a nurse.
The nurse said, “He’s DT’ing.”
Lynn didn’t understand.
“Detoxing.”
Lynn said nothing.
“Withdrawal,” the nurse said. “From alcohol.”
The DTs, delirium tremens. In the alcoholic’s world, they’re also known as “the shaking horrors.” They happen when a person addicted to alcohol is deprived of alcohol. For all of Lynn’s experience—as a bartender, as a drinker herself—she had never been in the presence of anyone suffering DTs. And this wasn’t just anyone. This was the Jared who called her Mommy. At her son’s bedside, she had walked into the darkness of his life. What she saw, though she did not yet know it, was addiction. Her baby was an alcoholic.
At 7:52 a.m. on November 27, the Tucson hospital discharged Jared. His “Patient Discharge Instruction & Plan” paperwork came with these sentences:
Contact PCP [primary care physician] and/or 911 if chest pain or shortness of breath recurs. If any change in symptoms, call your doctor or come to the ER. May use Tylenol as needed. Seek medical attention if symptoms worsen. Take medications as prescribed.
Against all common sense, five days after multiple surgeries across the length of Jared’s body, the hospital sent him home. The harsh interpretation of the dismissal is that the hospital needed his bed for someone with a good insurance plan. In that case, the discharge instructions could be read in the world-weary voice of a hospital administrator saying, “We’re done with you, kid. Go home, even if you’re in pain from top to bottom and can barely sit in a wheelchair. Go home, good luck, and remember, if you really hurt, come to our ER, it’s only a transcontinental plane ride away.”
“He shouldn’t have been on any plane,” Lynn said. “They loaded him up with pain meds, morphine mainly.” She told the discharging doctor, “If anything happens to my child on this flight, I will kill you.”
Security at the Tucson airport searched him. “Every movement hurt,” Lynn said. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.’” Airline personnel in Atlanta raced his wheelchair through the airport to catch a flight being held. The plane’s cabin full of passengers was quiet when he entered—until his wheelchair dropped from the jetway into the plane. The abrupt jostling caused Jared to shout, “Mother-fucker!” The waiting passengers applauded his arrival—well and bravely done, albeit profanely.
Though it’s never a good thing to be struck by a car going sixty-five miles per hour, Jared’s experience could have been an exception. It might take two or three months to recover from his injuries, but in that time he could get sober. He was twenty-one years old. An accident that could have left him dead might have given him a future.
Lynn called me that winter. “A lawyer in Arizona is telling me Jared could have a lawsuit that might be worth $600,000.”
The lawyer had proposed a suit against the hospital. He needed Jared to stay in Myrtle Beach for a year, to be available for examinations and depositions. The proposal went nowhere because Jared made it clear he would not, could not, sit still.
“From the start all he talked about was getting well so he could go back to New Orleans,” Lynn said. “When we talked about the lawsuit, he sai
d no, he wouldn’t do it, the accident was his own fault, not the kid driving way over the speed limit. I explained that it would be against the hospital for kicking him out so quick. They threw him out, and he wasn’t ready to go anywhere. The airline wasn’t even going to let him on the plane, he looked so bad. But he was so damn stubborn. He kept saying, ‘Nope, it was my own fault. And the hospital took care of me.’”
Jared not only argued against a lawsuit, he continued to use alcohol. His only concession was to say he’d stay off vodka and drink beer. Lynn said, “I told him, ‘Honey, your little body doesn’t know the difference between vodka and beer. It’s all alcohol.’ But he was convinced that drinking beer was a hundred times better for him than drinking vodka. You couldn’t talk to his stubborn ass about that.”
When Jared had seen two television sets and two images of his mother in the Arizona hospital, he had revealed undeniable signs of addiction to alcohol. But Lynn had not understood that at the time, nor did I. And now she had missed a second, stronger sign. Jared’s “stubborn ass” had nothing to do with his refusal to pursue a lawsuit; the refusal was another symptom of the way alcohol had rewired his brain.
On New Year’s Eve 2010, two months after Jared had seen doubles of a TV set during DTs, the addiction made itself evident to Lynn in a prosaic way. Jared had not had a drink since the accident. Lynn agreed to bring him beer. She brought him a six-pack and heard him shout, “That’s not enough.” Six beers would not be enough?
A year off the road would have allowed Jared a full recovery from his injuries. He could have joined Jacob at a community college. He could have built a life alongside his brother and a crew of boyhood friends whose loyalty was fully measured during his recuperation in Myrtle Beach: they drove down from Virginia to celebrate his survival and took him, in his wheelchair, to a strip club.
Jacob tells the story: “Jared was more upset with having to stay in one place than he was with his injuries. He wasn’t about staying in one place very long. That’s why I and Corey Bean and Levi went down there to see him. At the strip club, he ran out of dollar bills. So Levi gave him a stack of ten bills. Wasn’t ten minutes later, Jared said, ‘Levi, I need more money.’ Levi says, ‘What happened to the money I gave you?’ Jared says, ‘I done gave it to the ladies.’ Levi says, ‘You gave away $100 already?’ He’d given Jared ten $10 bills, not ten ones. Of course, Jared was getting all kinds of free lap dances, being cute and being in the wheelchair. The girls were all going, ‘Oh, honey, what’s wrong with you?’”
With Jacob and the Virginians at his side, away from freight trains and $12 half-gallons of bottom-shelf vodka, Jared might have recognized the great good fortune of being broken into pieces by that speeding car in Arizona.
But the addiction was more powerful than any possible alternative. Even while in a wheelchair for nearly two months—even after hearing news of eight kids killed in a warehouse fire in New Orleans on December 28, 2010, even when he recognized the firetrap building and some of the dead, even though he knew his own squat, the Pink House, was a disaster waiting to happen—as soon as he could walk, Jared told his mother, he would return to New Orleans.
The addiction demanded to be fed. It wanted to go to New Orleans. It would take Jared along.
Lynn knew little about his life on the road. But she knew she didn’t like New Orleans and New York City. “They petrified me,” she said. She connected those cities with drug use, particularly heroin. “Jared told me he used heroin but only once because he didn’t like it. He said, ‘Mom, I drink. I’ve done coke, yeah, if somebody has it. But no heroin.’”
How ignorant we all were. Lynn’s phone calls kept me up to date on Jared’s progress after the Arizona surgeries. For a month, then two months and three, he stayed with his mother in Myrtle Beach. It was their longest time together in four years. I thought about his broken body, but not once during that recovery period did I think of addiction. How naive I was, a big-time newspaper columnist, a man of the world (hanging with sportswriters who sometimes couldn’t find their way home from the bar), and not once did I think of the real reason Jared wanted out of Myrtle Beach. Not once did I think of flying there to have a conversation about his sickness.
Instead, I liked Lynn’s story about a dinner with Jared in late February at Harold’s on the Ocean, a beachfront restaurant. “I told him he wasn’t going anywhere until he could walk a mile on the beach. I said, ‘If you can walk from here to the pier, you’re ready to go.’”
Damned if he didn’t do it.
Out of the wheelchair in Myrtle Beach, Jared used crutches for two weeks.
Off the crutches, he used a cane.
With the cane, he did the mile.
Took an hour, but he did it.
Lynn was an amateur photographer with an idea for a book. She asked people to write a word on the beach at the Atlantic’s edge. She asked for a word representing the one thing they would change about their lives. She took photographs as the tide moved over the words and erased them.
That day on the beach, after he had walked the mile, Lynn asked, “Jared, what would you wash away?”
He used the cane to scratch five letters in the sand.
B O O Z E
What he had never said, what he had refused to say, he had written in the sand.
His mother said, “Really?”
“Yeah,” he said.
What Lynn had first seen in the Arizona hospital room without knowing what she had seen, she now saw on the beach and recognized fully. She saw the frightening power of addiction, for even as Jared wanted booze gone, he could not resist it. On February 17, 2011, Lynn did a post to Facebook friends:
Went back to doc last week and he’s good to go. Took him a few days to stop using the crutches but he’s doing great now. Now he’s planning his big escape! Guess being stuck in bed at Mom’s for 3 months is all he can take.… Wish he would stay but at 22 years old I can’t make him do anything. All I can do is be there for him whenever he needs me. Thanks to everyone for your support, kindness and prayers. Neither Jared nor I would have made it through without each and every one of you.
The day he declared himself ready to get out of Myrtle Beach and back to New Orleans, Lynn called me.
“There’s nothing I can do to change his stubborn-ass mind,” she said.
“Pray,” I said.
On March 4, Jared left for New Orleans. He had been in Myrtle Beach 103 days.
SIX
The choice, Myrtle Beach or New Orleans, was no choice. The 103 days at his mother’s home had helped Jared heal. They also told him how much he missed New Orleans. Of course he wanted to be there. He was a star in the town’s travelin’ kid community. His buddy and bodyguard Knuckles said so. Knuckles was a big-shouldered bruiser who became Knuckles by using his knuckles to relieve drunks of their belligerence. “When Goblin spoke,” Knuckles said, “people listened.” Back in New Orleans, Louisiana, back in NOLA, Goblin prowled the French Quarter, a world of its own along the Mississippi, its heart beating to Bourbon Street’s jazz, where everyone knew everyone’s business, who slept with whom, who had warrants out, who was most likely to OD. There the Scurvy Bastards called him “Admiral.” I, the grandfather, had known him as Jared, a shy kid, always fun but always in the background. Not so in NOLA, not after years on the road. By the time he returned from Myrtle Beach, he had grown into the boss. He was Goblin, who made things happen.
He made a kid feel welcome. A kid named Eddo, seventeen years old, told me the story:
I was new to NOLA, and I ended up getting blacked out on Bourbon Street and woke up on the sidewalk. I had no idea where I was, where my friends were, or where my gear was. I was fucked. Oh, and to top it off, I was DT’ing. Not a fun combination. I wandered around the Quarter and eventually bumped into Goblin sitting with a girl named Alex Tallent.
He took me under his wing. He told me to sit down with them and wait. We sat and drank. Eventually, my friends found me. Most kids who frequent N
OLA are pretty pretentious, so it was surprising that Goblin offered to let me hang out with him and wait. It was really cool. I was lost in a city I had never been to, and fresh as fuck. That combination can be really dangerous in New Orleans, which is a pretty dangerous place anyway. Goblin was always like that, though. Always willing to help out another traveler. The Scurvy code: “Help is always on the way!”
Always bringing help, Goblin also did a mass baptism. Austin Hall, a kid with a guitar, had hitchhiked three days from Illinois. He heard somebody on Bourbon Street shout, “‘Oy! Come here, you! Welcome, we’re going to have some fun,’” Hall said. “He brought that cane with him on the bus from Myrtle Beach, and he marched down the street like a damned drum major. Dude, one time we led a bunch of tourists down to the Mississippi. Goblin had this weird hat on and told ’em he was an itinerant preacher who’d baptize them in the river. Fuckin’ gross river water. They asked if they could just dip their feet in it, and Goblin said, ‘No, the Lord says I gotta pour it over your head,’ and they let him do it—about fifteen of ’em.”
He created a wedding. He knew the bride, Sarafina Scarlet. She played a guitar and sang on Christine Maynard’s doorstep by the Decatur Street daiquiri shop. Her face had been on the side of a milk carton because she had run away from a girls’ home in California. Sarafina carried her guitar across her back to the boardwalk by the Mississippi, to Checkpoint Charlie’s, to her squat in the Eighth Ward. Christine said, “Sarafina had a delicate, lilting voice with a baseline of grit and determination.”
Jared knew her and might have loved her because he made it his business to know all the pretty ones, and if it’s true that we fall in love with another version of ourselves, Sarafina was that, a doll given life, her face soft and golden. What they had together was something other than a romantic relationship, maybe something better.
She said, “Goblin and I never so much as kissed, though the connection we had was very strong. It was more that we just understood each other. He was one of the most kindhearted kids I ever met on the road. Not a bad attitude or one to cause trouble. He just loved to be around friends and have a good time and be sweet to people. He always greeted me with the biggest hug, and we always laughed together. Even after he got hit by the car, he hobbled around with a cane looking for the next adventure with all our friends. I gave him the nickname ‘Hobblin’ Goblin.’ If he had feelings for me, he never did anything about them. I was dating another boy at the time.”
